Happy Mother's Day!

I'm going to start with a disclaimer. I'm really not obsessed with getting stuff, or being recognized, in general, and certainly not for mother's day. Matt's in trouble if he doesn't get me a card for mother's day and my birthday, but really, that's the extent of it. Okay. On with the show.

As I've said before, this week is a little hairy. Boss gone, a few things (I almost typed 'several' -- oops) taking me away from work for a couple of hours at a time, just a lot to juggle. A lot more than I usually do, anyway. I'm quite sure that most of you out there juggle more than I do at your jobs normally. But it's the difference in what we usually handle that's shocking to us, right?

One of the things I sort of forgot about -- mostly because it didn't much matter if I remembered or not -- was that Lizzy's day care planned a 'Mother's Day breakfast' for us this morning. At 9 a.m. Ideally, I drop her off by more like 8:30, but today we were rather late anyway, so it was nearly 9 when we got there. Oh yeah -- a mother's day breakfast. Um, er, I'm not hungry, but okay. So all the mothers wait around (probably about 15 of us) in a space that was about 5 feet wide by about 20 feet long, for about 20 minutes, waiting for the lead teacher to show up. Finally, she does, and she organizes the kids into some semblance of rows. They recite a poem, in which each letter of MOTHER stands for something that we mothers are. Don't ask me to repeat what they were. I do recall that some of the words were things that 3- and 4-year-olds have no idea of the meanings of, which totally cracked me up. For instance: E was Earnest. heh. I was more engrossed in the fact that Lizzy was standing at the very back, not terribly interested in chanting the poem, or singing the song, which she knows backwards and forwards because we have it on a "Bob and Larry" (Veggie Tales) CD that's on the regular rotation of Tunes To Drive Your Parents Nuts With On Your Family Commute. ("You Are My Sunshine")

Afterward, each kid gave his/her mom a flower. The stem of the carnation was breaking, so I broke it off (some stem was still left attached) and put it in Lizzy's cubby area in the hallway. She then threw herself on the floor and wailed for me to give her "her" flower back, with stem. When I convinced her to eat some of the breakfast the day care ladies had thoughtfully made available, she wanted to sit with her friend Sean, who was wedged in between his mom and two or three other kids with moms, against the table that was supporting other little top-heavy treats for the moms. I alternately tried to balance in the roughly 4-inch-by-4-inch space available, then finally gave up and stood a few feet away. Watching the kids stomp through, spilling red juice on the floor, watching the candy swans on the table tip over and shower the little heads with Hershey's Kisses periodically, watching a little girl attempt to share a waffle with Lizzy when Lizzy wanted a waffle but they were all gone (Lizzy refused it, and put it back on the girl's plate repeatedly -- there's no fun like watching another mom try to explain to her same-aged tot why my child is refusing her kind gesture!). Watching the clock, knowing that I have roughly 5 1/2 more things to do at work today than I have time for, yet here I am, at a mother's day breakfast, not eating, not sitting with my kid and generally experiencing what it's sometimes like to be a mother.
But it was very sweet of the day care ladies. They are gems. I love Lizzy's day care.
Happy Mother's Day, to all of us. Because if we're not moms, we've got moms, or we act momlike sometimes... Oh, never mind. Happy day, anyway.